Naomi Osaka, Microchips And Digital Collectibles: This Week's Most Interesting Sports Business …

In this week’s SportsMoney Playbook: the gaming world’s microchip dilemma, Naomi Osaka’s new threads and more money for digital collectibles. Plus: a trailblazing basketball recruiter shares her NBA dreams. Sports Business Tibles, a digital collectibles platform that uses blockchain technology to trade NFTs, announced a $1.14 million funding round led by Dapper Labs, the creator of NBA Top Shot. Another online marketplace for buying and selling collectibles, Whatnot, raised $50 million in Series B funding just three months after a $20 million Series A round. The audio-focused social media app Clubhouse is media’s hot new property, but Twitter has been methodically building out a competitor over the last year. Sports leagues like MLB and the NBA have quickly taken to the product. College Sports A partnership between an early mover in the student-athlete social media space and a data analytics company known for industry valuations could give star college athletes like Paige Bueckers and Chet Holmgren an idea of the market value of their NIL rights. Basketball With financial backing from Dikembe Mutombo, Grant Hill and Joakim Noah, the NBA is launching an entity that will conduct the league’s business in Africa, including the Basketball Africa League, content distribution and grassroots development of players. The National Interscholastic Basketball Conference, a new coalition of top private-high-school teams across the nation, is poised to pit future Division I players against one another. That challenge motivated five-star recruit and Kentucky commit Skyy…
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